197. The Pirate Hunter

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0:29My name was William Kidd when I sailed when I sailed. My name was William Kidd when I sailed. God's laws I did forbid and so wickedly I did when I sailed I had a Bible in my hand when I sailed when I sailed I had a Bible in my hand when I sailed But my father's great command, I sunk it in the sand when I sailed Hello, welcome to Empire, with me Anita Arlen Me William Durable This is a part of a sea shanty which was written just after the death of a man who you will have heard the name thanks to Hollywood and fictionalisation, William Kidd, one of the most famous pirates who has entered the public consciousness.

1:11But was he a pirate at all? Or was he a man who was set up by a bunch of avaricious politicians? That's what we're going to be talking about today. It's part of our piracy series. And I know you're obsessed with pirates, it turns out. I mean, who knew? You're back in India and you've suddenly discovered a shelf full of pirate books. I've got a whole shelf of pirate books here, including some quite interesting and scholarly ones. There is a character that you and I need to have come across before, who was an extraordinary Raj archivist called Charles Gray, who for a long time with the ne 'er-do-wells in Ranjit Singh's Sikh army, produced an extraordinary book of all the mercenaries and misfits who were recruited into Ranjit Singh's force.

1:53He's done a similar thing called Pirates of the Eastern Seas out of all the Indian archives. And it turns out there's a huge amount of files in Indian archives between Lahore, Calcutta, Delhi, and so on, of cases of piracy off the Indian coast. And there was a whole world of people who had stolen ships or gone awry, who particularly preyed on the Mughal Hajj traffic. You had all these people going from Gujarat over to what's now Saudi Arabia. And these guys preyed on them, caught the ships, took the gold and often enslaved the Hajis. Let's do a whole episode on that. I think we should. I think it's the most extraordinary story.

2:31Yeah, but let's talk about Kidd in this one, because it's a really complicated thing. You talk about archives. And I think this is a man who's been quite badly served by archives that were produced near the time because of political agendas. But I'll tell you why. So first of all, who is William Kidd? More commonly known as Captain Kidd. You'll like this because he was Scottish, a Scottish sailor and privateer who lived during the late 17th century. It's a very interesting matter how much not only the pirates themselves were often Scots, but the mythologisers of pirates were Scots. Robbie Lewin Stevenson, for example.

3:04Treasure Island. Well, I was just going to say, Treasure Island makes reference to Kidd, directly to Kidd. And Treasure Island was written in my hometown of North Berwick, looking onto the Bass Rock. And it's always said in North Berwick law that the Bass Rock was his model. When he drew a map of Trezor Island, he was actually drawing a map of Bass Rock. Same shape. The Bass Rock, for those of you who've missed it, is basically, it's a very posh name for a thing made of seagull shit. It just sort of sticks out of the water. I'll give it a grand description myself. But yeah, it has got a lot of gannets on it and a lot of gannet shit.

3:36Yes, gannet shit island. But look, Stevenson was particularly affected by the story, because he must have grown up with the stories of William Kidd. He doesn't name him in Treasure Island, but the whole idea of this buried treasure is directly taken from William Kidd's life. Because William Kidd was said to have buried a huge hoard of treasure, which people are still looking for even now. Genuinely, yeah. I mean, there are expeditions to find it, yeah. And Washington Irving, another writer who's written about Captain Kidd's treasure in 1820, wrote the sketchbook. Not just Washington Irving, but another major American writer, Edgar Allan Poe, wrote a William Kidd short story.

4:10He was a very big figure in 19th century New York. The Americans are obsessed with him, and that's partly, you can tell, because there's this fantastic, I re-watched it, I watched it ages ago, but it's a 1945 film starring Charles Lawton. You know, famous Charles Lawton, who played Henry VIII. So Charles Lawton is kid in this, and he does the role very seriously in the first one. And then he does it with Abbott and Costello again in 1952. But what I loved was the Charlottesville original film, where he is this really, I mean, skullduggerous, nasty, you know, the opening scene of the film, Captain Kidd, is him burying his treasure and then shooting a man and leaving the dead body on top.

4:49and he does these great lines like, dead men can't talk and things like that. And he calls all his crew gallows meat and things like that. But the reason I wanted to talk about the film was because Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that it was Joseph Stalin's favourite film. He loved it. I did not see that coming. No, I know. And do you know why it was his favourite film? Because Stalin, identified with Kit, who in this film is actually quite a shitty fellow. He sort of comes up from the rough streets and wants to mingle in high society. I can see that because one of the things about kid's life, it's very difficult to tell what's true and what's not, but he seems always to be steering a line between hunting pirates and being a pirate himself.

5:33And that's very sort of Stalin-esque. Stalin started off by robbing banks as a young man and ended up as president. Yeah, and the whole film, I mean, you talked about the pirates in your shelf who were targeting Mughal treasure. And that's also the plot of the film. And actually, there is truth in this, because even pirates who were operating out of Scotland, or privateers, when they were hired as privateers, often to attack enemy ships and to protect the East India Company trade. But some of them said, sod this. We know where the treasure is. It's on the Mughal ships. We're going to switch sides.

6:08So this is the backdrop to the piracy stories that we're telling. And I think beyond that backdrop, there's this fascinating idea of a world where at the beginning of this period, in the mid-17th century, the British are absolutely on the margins of everything. And they can just be the wreckers. They can be the pirates who are just stopping to raid Portuguese and Spanish treasure ships, raid whatever they like of the Mughals. And they are basically a nation of pirates, which is what the Spanish ambassador calls the first crew of the East Indian Company, where they set off pirates, pirates, pirates.

6:40But by the end of the story, though, the British are in charge and they now have to enforce their authority and there's no room for pirates. What's interesting is that Britain is described variously as a nation of pirates and a nation of shopkeepers. You know, Napoleon famously said that. But let's talk about Kidd. So William Kidd was born in Scotland, in Dundee in 1645. And I think it's really important to talk about formative years. Although we don't know much detail, we do know what Dundee was like in 1645. Do you think it was a pleasant place to live, William, in 1645? Well, it has to be said that there are different accounts.

7:15And there's another version of his early life, which is a measure of how elusive he is, which has him in Greenock on the other side of Scotland, the son of a Presbyterian minister. So you've got these two completely different origin stories, which, like the rest of his life, you have to sort of pick and choose between completely different versions of events. I'll go with the Dundee version, because more modern scholarship would place him in Dundee. And you're right, the early stuff just completely is all over the map. But where he was born, and this is a place that was ravaged by the wars of the three kingdoms.

7:41So, you know, there were people who supported the Presbyterian Church in Scotland up against royalists who support King Charles I. And there are religious difficulties. And so this is a place that's sort of ravaged by war. And also he's born into a time of plague. So, you know, there is a terrible plague rampaging through. So there is death and decay and war and loss of life. That is his sort of childhood imprint. We don't know everything about his family, but again, modern scholarship would suggest that he had a relatively modest background, the son of a man called John Kidd, who was a sailor himself, and a woman called Bessie Butchart.

8:18I love that name. I hope I'm saying it right. Is there a Scottish pronunciation for Butchart that I'm getting wrong? B-U-T-C-H-A-R-T. Butchart. Butchart. Butchart. Sounds better than Butchart. And his father dies at sea when he's five years old. So he's with this mother who's struggling to bring up this child and she remarries. And clearly that is not a happy situation for little William because he runs away to sea when he's just a teenager. And again, this sort of throws you into this world where people grew up a lot faster in those days. And he first enters the record as a seaman in the 1680s where he is on a ship where there is a mutiny.

8:55And this is a privateer ship, which is supposedly under license, as we were saying, privateers were hired by the British government to go and protect British interests and attack Dutch ships, French ships in particular, and anybody else who was challenging this nascent trade that they were establishing with India. And he's on this ship and there's a mutiny. And the mutiny occurs. And for some reason, young kid is seen to have leadership qualities. And it's the first time you sort of get the impression that there is something about this lad that, you know, people want to follow. And that's what happens.

9:30But by 1689, this young sort of skinny lad, you imagine, from not a very lovely background, goes and he joins a privateer ship traveling the Caribbean under this man called Captain Jean Fadin. And this ship, again, mutinies are really common because if you don't give your crew, and often the crews are sort of rough old sorts who are gathered together from prisons, a lot of them. I mean, you know, only those people put up with life at sea. So a lot of people are sort of harvested from the Marshall Sea or Newgate Prison. They're desperate fellows. And life at sea, and I know you know about this, life at sea was terrible.

10:06I mean, just remind people, in the mid-17th century, being on a ship for months at a time is not a pleasant thing. No, it's a very, very rough world. And very few people join the Navy if they have any other options. It's very much bottom of the pecking order. And I think that's true elsewhere, too. I mean, obviously, the Ottoman galleys at the same time are largely filled with galley slaves. I mean, no one chooses to go to sea at this period. So there's a mutiny on the ship against Tata, and Kidd sort of rises up. And I think he renames the ship. He calls it the Blessed William. Very nice. And so he's off, sort of like a man in his own Ford Cortina, for the first time, taking to the open seas or the open roads and, you know, sort of quite muscular.

10:49And he actually, like many privateers at the time, becomes not enlisted formally, but asked to defend a British territory. So he's asked to defend Nevis from French ships because they are surrounded by French ships. And, you know, he's young, he's strong. He's got a crew that likes him. He's on the Blessed William and he does it. He does it really quite well. So he starts attacking the French islands of Marigallant and destroying a town and looting because, you know, he's got these desperate men. and he needs to feed more of their greed. And he gathers around£2 ,000 sterling, which is an enormous sum of money.

11:28More than you could get in Dundee at that time, certainly. And the poverty and the sort of misery that he's left behind. But he also gets rewarded by the authorities, because if you are a successful privateer, and if you are attacking French interests, you get rewards. So he gets£150 for successful privateering in the Caribbean. So this is a man who knows the waters, which are going to be very, very important around another great trading route that is being established around the Caribbean. And he starts getting a name for himself. But you know what? If you have mutinous men on your ship, who's to say they're not going to mutiny against you?

12:04And his crew eventually gets sick of him as well, even though he's sort of quite successful for a while. And they dump him. They dump him. And they sort of sail off with the Blessed William. And he is just like Johnny Depp, trying to get the Black Pearl back. The man who's responsible for the dumpage is a man called Robert Culliford, who is a notorious pirate who steals his ship and his crew. Who we will meet later on in this tale. We absolutely will. And it is very much like Pirates of the Caribbean. These characters who sort of do each other down somewhere in the Caribbean, bump into each other again somewhere quite different, like sort of Madagascar or off the coast of Kerala at Tully Cherry.

12:43And these guys are moving between these worlds, between preying on Portuguese and Spanish shipping in the Caribbean, fighting the French in the Caribbean, raiding French islands there, or then sailing down, trying their luck off the coast of India, off the coast of French islands like what's now Reunion. And these guys are going backwards and forwards on their own trajectories. And at this point, he's basically with the law, isn't he? He's a privateer. He is. So shall I do the Anita question? What did he look like? Well, there is this portrait. You've got the portrait, I hope, in front of you.

13:19Describe William, because when I do, I get accused of being lascivious. I don't think you can be very lascivious about this portrait, but what does he look like in it? I don't think anyone would be very serious about this portrait. He looks like a sort of disgruntled clergyman who's just had his sermon snatched by a parishioner or something. He's got a sort of chin-length wig, not the full wig, but a sort of half wig, which I think you'd associate with a lawyer at this period or a clergyman. He's got a white kerchief around his neck, a sort of white cravat, and he's got a collarless jacket. And he looks exactly more like a lawyer or a clergyman than he does a pirate in this picture.

13:55He does. And you know what? This painting is really interesting. God knows if it looks like him because it was painted after he died by a man called Sir James Thornhill. Now, Sir James Thornhill, for those who know their art, was an English painter of great renown, but he never met the guy. He sort of did this painting. He's also sort of more famous for doing Isaac Newton and people like that. But he was sort of fascinated by Kidd. He's also the man, by the way, James Thornhill, who did some of those enormous murals in the Royal Hospital in Greenwich. You can see he did those. I've never seen those.

14:27They're impressive. And paintings on the inside of the Dome of St. Paul's Cathedral. That's Thornhill's work. And you've got Thornhill doing sort of Chatsworth House and Wimpole Hall and all these really important places. But he gives us this portrait of a man of means. Compare that to the image that actually most of us have of Kidd, a desperate pirate, bandana around his head, snarly face and earring. Johnny Depp. Johnny Depp. And do you know where that comes from? It comes from a man. And again, I love the way this is a man who creates the images that then become historical truth. So that image of the Johnny Depp type pirate comes to us courtesy of a man called Howard Pyle.

15:06Howard Pyle was a children's illustrator. And some 49 years after Kidd died, he did illustrations for a story about Kidd. You know, sort of painted him as a snarling evil. He reeks of evil. He sort of looks a little bit sort of like Lucifer. And that is the image that passes into the public consciousness. And we also have Howard Pyle to thank, by the way, for repurposing Robin Hood. Yes. The hat, the feather. The pixie boots. The pixie outfit. The Peter Pan outfit. That, again, is a Howard Pyle creation. How amazing. Because bet your butt he didn't look like that. But after these children's books, which, you know, all these other people would have read when they go on to make films or art in the future, that is the thing that sits in their childhood mind.

15:49I think we should actually even do a whole episode on how these stories, which are rough, tough, murderous stories of desperate men, end up bizarrely as children's literature. Do you think that is unusual? Because we have kids who grow up on cartoons, even from the earliest age, cartoons where people take a big mallet and hit a smaller creature on the head and squish it. Is it a children's need or our need to scare children? I don't know. What do you think? Interesting, isn't it? Yeah. But look, after he's sort of lost his blessed William to this terrible other pirate, because there is no honour among thieves, that is clear in the pirating and privateering world.

16:27He ends up going to America where he does become actually a reflection of that respectable portrait that you described before. Because he starts trade like other people. You know, he has maritime experience. And he marries an heiress. The richest woman, some say, in New York. Sarah Ort is her name. Is that a Dutch name? Is that from the Dutch community in New York? Does sound it, doesn't it? Around this time, I think it would have just stopped being New Amsterdam and become New York. So, yeah, that would make sense that she has a Dutch name. But Sarah and William moved to this rather huge townhouse on Wall Street.

17:06How can you get more respectable than that? Literally on Wall Street itself. On Wall Street. Actually on Wall Street. Brilliant. And I sort of did some digging to see what his life was like in New York. And he was a pillar of the community. There is a church on Wall Street called Trinity Church, still stands to this day. And one of the people they have to thank for Trinity Church existing at all is William Kidd. Not, you know, the snarly pirate, but William Kidd, the respectable man. Who endows churches. Not just endows, helped to build it. So I was looking through, there's some records that go back to 1696.

17:42minutes of the vestry of Trinity Church. And it says, Captain Kidd has lent a runner and tackle for the hoising, it says, which I think should be hoisting, up of stones as long as he stays there. And a runner and tackle, do you know what that might be? It would seem to be something to lift stones, wouldn't it? Pulleys, pulleys, like on a ship. And it says while he lives here. But we know that the church had a relationship with Kidd. He probably never, ever sat in the church because it wouldn't have been finished and he was already on the move by the time it was finished. But there was a rented pew in Captain Kidd's name, the most important pew, until years after he was, this is a Dalrymple spoiler, hanged in disgrace.

18:23I know, I did it. Are you telling the end? I'm just giving you a little foreshadowing of the fact that, you know, this is not how he thought his life would go. In a sense, he's already lived an entire life trajectory. He's grown up poor. He's gone to the seas. He's then arrived in New York and ended up on Wall Street. You'd have thought that's the end of the story. But far from it. It isn't. No. It would be for somebody. But he comes into the orbit of the governor of New York. Because if you are an important man with money and you give money to the church and you're respectable and you've got a pew coming your way.

18:55By the way, it was a pew right at the front where all the important people sat for him and his family. But he meets the governor of New York and Massachusetts, a man called the Earl of Belmont. But the Earl of Belmont is having a right load of problems with ships being attacked. You know, this is a disaster because French vessels have been attacking British interests. And these are still, you know, sort of British interests. And he needs somebody who knows the waters. So he says, look, I think we might need a man who has knowledge of those waters and also has worked with privateers and might have had a ship stolen out from under him so knows these people can't be trusted.

19:35to come and work for us. And this is where this idea sort of develops, not just between him, but other members, really important members of the British ruling class, including the Lord Chancellor, the First Lord of the Admiralty, the Master of Ordnance and the Secretary of State. So they all start sort of thinking, we need to get a man who is going to fight for us. And that man is William Kidd. Let's take a break, because this is not how the story eventually goes.

20:12Welcome back. So we're now at the point where William Kidd, respectable New Yorker married to an heiress living on Wall Street, is being tempted back into the privateer business. And in 1689, he is given what is called a letter of Mark, which I have in front of me. And this is the text. Now know ye that being desirous to prevent the aforesaid mischiefs, and inasmuch as in us lies to bring said pirates, freebooters, and sea robbers to justice, we do hereby grant and give to said William Kidd a commission as a private man of war, bearing the date 11th day of December 1695, and unto all who shall be under your command full power and authority to apprehend, seize, and take into yours and their true and fully authorised lawful custody the said captains to Ireland, Wake, Mays, and all others such pirates, freebooters, and sea robbers, being either of our own nation or other notions associated with them, which you shall meet upon the seas and coasts of America, or upon any other sea or coast, with all their ships and vessels, and upon all such merchandise, money, goods, and wares as shall be found on board.

21:33So that's quite a letter to set you off. It is quite a letter. So the letter of Mark was a real thing to co-opt and legitimize people who may have been involved in privateering to say, right, you're ours now, you work for us. Now, I never became the lawyer that my dad wanted me to be, but it is worth looking at the small print of that said contract, the Mark that you just said, because what it also does is it ties Kit up with these very powerful people. He gets the letter of Mark when he travels to London and he travels in his own ship, a ship called the Antigua. But the Antigua is not fast enough, not big enough, not muscly enough to take on the pirates.

22:10So as part of the letter of Mark, there is a deal that is done that these very powerful rich men who are part of the Whig establishment are going to pay for this new ship that is going to be good enough and strong enough and fast enough with enough cannons to take on some of the very notorious pirates that were named in that letter of mark, including True, who was really the worst of the worst deemed to be in England because he'd been so successful robbing ships with British interests. So four-fifths of the cost of building this new ship for kids, specifically for kids, is going to be put up by the Earl of Orford, Baron Romney, the Duke of Shrewsbury, and a man called Sir John Summers.

22:49But they don't want to come to the forefront. They're going to fund the They're going to stump up the money. Kid is going to have to sell the Antigua and use some of his tobacco money to pay for the rest. But the small, small print of that letter of Mark is that whatever Kid gets, whatever loot he gets, 10 % of the loot is going to go to the king, to King William. It is reserved for the crown. So basically, it's a commission-based system where the king also benefits. So you can't get much more of a blessing from the crown, from the government, from power than this. I thought a very interesting thing in that letter is we've always talked about privateers.

23:26I've never seen it written out in full as a private man of war. Yes, isn't it good? And that's what it is. That is exactly what it is. And what's so interesting is the more we look at early British colonial stories, the more we find that it is the state privatizing stuff, whether it's to a corporation and leasing areas of Virginia and the right to start a foundation in Virginia or Hudson Bay or in India. But the same is going on with naval activity. You don't send off the Navy. You just get a businessman with business interests who has little knowledge of the sea to do his own private Navy work, a private man of war.

24:00Yes, but there is a question that I'm grappling with, having spent a lot of time with William Kidd, which is why on earth would he want to do this? because, you know, life on the sea is not as cushy as the life he's got on Wall Street. You know, it's just a fact. He's got money. He's got status. It is dirty. It is disease-ridden on these ships. It is a rough life that he has known since he was a young teenager. Why would he? The answer that comes to, you know, the picture of Captain Kidd is that he was this wanton robber on the seas. He was almost sort of forced to do it because once the king has asked you to do a thing, once the king has summoned you, can you say no?

24:35can you come to London and be offered the letter of Mark and then say, no, I don't want to do it. And is there a sense in which the British are taking advantage of this sort of colonial who's turned up in London? Well, I mean, he's a Scot. He's a nouveau riche Scot. So I think they think, you know, they own him and he owes them. I mean, that's sort of the attitude of the aristocracy at the time. So these shadowy Whigs who are not putting their own names forward, who are in the background, are basically chancing his life rather than theirs. Well, I mean, of course, they're not going to go to sea, are they?